Scraps from F. Scott’s notebook

My edition of The Crack-Up, from New Directions, includes a bunch of other assorted scraps found in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notebook. They are amazing. Plots, lines, ideas, whatever. Here are some from the two pages I happened to open to:

A tree, finding water, pierces roof and solves a mystery.

Girl and giraffe

Marionettes during dinner party meeting and kissing

Play about a whole lot of old people – terrible things happen to them and they don’t really care.

Play: The Office – an orgy after hours during the boom.

A bat chase. Some desperate young people apply for jobs at Camp, knowing nothing about wood lore but pretending, each one.

Girl whose ear is so sensitive she can hear radio. Man gets her out of insane asylum to use her.

Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You’ve got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges. (hear that DFW?!)

Girl marries a dissipated man and keeps him in healthy seclusion. She meanwhile grows restless and raises hell on the side